How exceptional are we?

It's common in the U.S. to think of ourselves as an exceptional nation in some way or another. In some cases, it seems, we're so exceptional that the experiences of other nations offer no examples for us to learn from or models to emulate. David Brooks observes that "The Brits and Canadians I know certainly love their single-payer health care systems," but goes on to devote a column to his inability to imagine how Americans could get something similar. "The trick is in the transition," he writes, and so it must have been in Canada or Brit-land or anyplace else that has adopted a single-payer system, which some Americans would translate as "Medicare for All." There had to be resistance and fear in all those countries, but Brooks seems to imply that it was easy everywhere else, while the U.S. is the inevitable exception. He falls back on national stereotypes to excuse his analytic laziness. "Americans are more decentralized, diverse and individualistic than people in the nations with single-payer systems," he writes, "They are more suspicious of government and tend to dislike higher taxes." Elsewhere, you see, tax-collection day is a public holiday with concerts, face-painting and bounce houses. Only Americans hate taxes; only Americans fear centralized authority -- but this is so much bull, just like Brooks' resigned conclusion that "the easiest way to get to a single-payer system would probably be to go back to 1776 and undo that whole American Revolution thing." Who doubts, however, that in any nation that is not a dictatorship where single-payer is proposed, people sincerely reactionary or simply well-financed, doctors and patients actual and potential, cried "socialism!" and warned of the end of individual liberty? Wherever such resistance, rhetorical and institutional, was overcome, there is a model for overcoming resistance in the U.S., if you actually want single-payer. It's easy for someone who probably doesn't want it to abandon hope, but the way that Brooks so complacently abandons hope only leaves the impression, not that Americans are hopelessly exceptional, but that we're exceptionally hopeless.